Aiken

Concord, NC to Aiken, SC. We managed to ride with the top down until we got to Chesterfield, SC to visit Donna’s cousin Laurie and her husband Ted. When we left them at around 11:00 it was already over 90º. After passing through a rain shower with the cloud cover still intact we finished the last 30 miles with it down again. It sure is fun visiting places, but it is great to be back home. Some trip notes:

1. When I got in the car this morning the odometer read 62005 for the 3rd milestone of the trip, didn’t notice it last night when we parked.
2. Total mileage for the trip: 2,637.4 for an average of 240 miles per day. Even though it didn’t move at all for a day and a half in DC and our hotel in CT was only 6 miles from the house.
3. I filled up with gas 11 times or about once a day. The highest price paid for gas was $3.40 in Yorktown Heights, NY and the lowest was $2.88 in Clear Brook, VA. Average cost for the whole trip $3.15 (premium fuel.)
4. Don’t ask about mileage because I don’t track that. I will do some quick math and see if it over 27 MPG. If it is, everything is OK.
5. Signs on the side of the road in Connecticut warned that the fine for littering is $219. Why the odd figure?
6. We took money out of a free standing ATM machine in a hotel lobby and the fee for using it was $3.05, not the usual two bucks. I can understand $3, but why the extra nickel?
7. Public restrooms are scarcer up north compared to around here. So sometimes we had to get creative.
     a. The first floor in hotels will always have restrooms, just walk in like you belong there.
     b. We used the restrooms just inside the entrance of the Newton, NJ hospital when asking around downtown failed to turn up any place to go.
8. At one hotel restroom break we even grabbed a banana off the breakfast bar, because the place we had stayed at didn’t have them. So if you are bold enough you should be able to walk right in and get a whole breakfast at most places.
9. I bought a hooded sweatshirt at Furman U in Greenville on the way up. It served me well at altitude on the Blue Ridge Parkway and in the unseasonably cool CT weather, but will now be exiled to the back of the closet until November.
10. I managed to finish one paperback book on the trip, good thing I was a quarter of the way through when we started.
11. High-speed internet access was free everywhere we stayed and ranged from very marginal in a middle of the hall room in the Farmington Inn to excellent in a room at the end of the hall at the same place.
      a. Last night’s started good and got crappy later in the evening. Even tried the Cat-5 cable which professed to having a 10Mb connection wouldn’t do crap. Maybe there is a download throttle…

I didn’t take any pictures today, so for your entertainment, I present a shot of the Colonnade at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, VA from yesterday.